#i ordered the books from a site

[sugaroto]

Me and the all for the game books exist in the same land right now

[dionysism]

HEARTBREAKING: my collectors edition iliad translated by lattimore arrives today and i'm on vacation so i won't be able to read it for another week almost

[grassbreads]

I'm gonna have to really tighten up my budget soon (the student loan pause is ending 😔), so I decided to give myself one big manga buying last hurrah before I sit down with the finance spreadsheet. I also, for unrelated reasons, ordered a couple volumes of manga, a webcomic printing, and a book earlier this week.

I have more packages coming in the next month than I've had at literally any other point in my lifetime. It's Hanukkah in August for Andromeda.

[thriftdyke]

tagged by @grieving4theliving 9 favorite books! I suck at remembering books I loved in the past so these are just the books I’m used to telling people are my favorite books plus some I’ve read recently plus fav series. (for series I tried to choose my fav from each but the series as a whole can also be represented)

tagging:

@loveyouslay @jordanshenessy @friendofcars @eruditetyro @lesbianjudasiscariot and anybody else who wants to!

[sixofravens-reads]

Okay, semi-successful indigo order: got vol 1 of Chobits and Clover, omnibuses 1 and 2 of xxxHolic, A House with Good Bones, and an older Kelly Link anthology, Stranger Things Happen.

They didn't have White Cat, Black Dog in stock, but I'll check back later this week for it. Also, will keep my eyes peeled for more manga at the comic expo - oftentimes there will be booths with older titles. I couldn't find the first omnibus of X, the last one of Cardcaptor Sakura, and Magic Knight Rayearth was only available in the mega expensive box sets, but I'm hoping I can find those at the expo. Also MKR is apparently being re-released in paperback in September? So if I'm still interested then I'll keep my eyes peeled for it.

[mearcatsreturns]

I really should know better than to trust Barnes & Noble after having worked there.

I don’t buy books from Amazon, but GOD, if the cost is having to deal with this bullshit...

[fictional-worlds-are-exquisite]

BOOK DEPOSITORY IS CLOSING??? NOOO THIS IS THE WORST DAY

[undead-moth]

Because this is such an excellent post I'm going to try to keep my infodump here brief but I can't pass it up:

Whether or not something that happens within a story is "realistic" is determined by an agreement made between the writer and the audience in the premise.

The writer establishes the rules of the world and promises not to break them as long as you, the audience, promise to believe anything that happens without breaking them is real even if they aren't plausible or possible (re: realistic) in real life.

This is where the term "suspension of disbelief" comes from. If the writer asks you to suspend your disbelief higher than they initially promised in the premise, that means they broke one of the rules, and something has happened that goes against what you agreed to believe is plausible or possible for the purposes of immersing yourself in the story. If a story asks you to suspend your disbelief too high from the outset, that means something about this story is just too implausible or impossible as a premise for you to immerse yourself in personally.

When something "unrealistic" happens within a story, it very specifically refers to what shouldn't be plausible or possible within the story's universe -

It does not refer to what is implausible or impossible in real life.

This is why criticism of tragedies, horror, and musicals are often missing the point, and don't offer productive analysis. It doesn't matter if someone in real life would "wait a few minutes" to see if Juliet wakes up. It doesn't matter if losing cell service is "convenient." It doesn't matter if no one "bursts into song" in real life. None of these genres have the same rules as real life and they're not meant to.

If these genres are asking you to suspend your disbelief higher than you're able to, it's fair to not be a fan of them. It's not fair to insist all of these genres actually suck just because they don't conform to the specific height at which you personally prefer a story to suspend your disbelief.

This is a dangerous sentiment for me to express, as an editor who spends most of my working life telling writers to knock it off with the 45-word sentences and the adverbs and tortured metaphors, but I do think we're living through a period of weird pragmatic puritanism in mainstream literary taste.

e.g. I keep seeing people talk about 'purple prose' when they actually mean 'the writer uses vivid and/or metaphorical descriptive language'. I've seen people who present themselves as educators offer some of the best genre writing in western canon as examples of 'purple prose' because it engages strategically in prose-poetry to evoke mood and I guess that's sheer decadence when you could instead say "it was dark and scary outside". But that's not what purple prose means. Purple means the construction of the prose itself gets in the way of conveying meaning. mid-00s horse RPers know what I'm talking about. Cerulean orbs flash'd fire as they turn'd 'pon rollforth land, yonder horizonways. <= if I had to read this when I was 12, you don't get to call Ray Bradbury's prose 'purple'.

I griped on here recently about the prepossession with fictional characters in fictional narratives behaving 'rationally' and 'realistically' as if the sole purpose of a made-up story is to convince you it could have happened. No wonder the epistolary form is having a tumblr renaissance. One million billion arguments and thought experiments about The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas that almost all evade the point of the story: that you can't wriggle out of it. The narrator is telling you how it was, is and will be, and you must confront the dissonances it evokes and digest your discomfort. 'Realistic' begins on the author's terms, that's what gives them the power to reach into your brain and fiddle about until sparks happen. You kind of have to trust the process a little bit.

This ultra-orthodox attitude to writing shares a lot of common ground with the tight, tight commodification of art in online spaces. And I mean commodification in the truest sense - the reconstruction of the thing to maximise its capacity to interface with markets. Form and function are overwhelmingly privileged over cloudy ideas like meaning, intent and possibility, because you can apply a sliding value scale to the material aspects of a work. But you can't charge extra for 'more challenging conceptual response to the milieu' in a commission drive. So that shit becomes vestigial. It isn't valued, it isn't taught, so eventually it isn't sought out. At best it's mystified as part of a given writer/artist's 'talent', but either way it grows incumbent on the individual to care enough about that kind of skill to cultivate it.

And it's risky, because unmeasurables come with the possibility of rejection or failure. Drop in too many allegorical descriptions of the rose garden and someone will decide your prose is 'purple' and unserious. A lot of online audiences seem to be terrified of being considered pretentious in their tastes. That creates a real unwillingness to step out into discursive spaces where you 🫵 are expected to develop and explore a personal relationship with each element of a work. No guard rails, no right answers. Word of god is shit to us out here. But fear of getting that kind of analysis wrong makes people hove to work that slavishly explains itself on every page. And I'm left wondering, what's the point of art that leads every single participant to the same conclusion? See Spot run. Run, Spot, run. Down the rollforth land, yonder horizonways. I just want to read more weird stuff.

[alwaysscheesin]

So sad Peach Flower House is closing 😔

Had to drop a hundred on some titles that have been sitting in my cart for a few months.

Fr if anyone has been wanting PFH published novels buy them now before even their site is completely closed. ☹️

[smilesandexits]

made the mistake of ordering something late on thursday and now it's sunday and i'm like

pakige not moving :(

[yokelfelonking]

Post 9/11 Trivia

Most folks on this site were either children on September 11, 2001, or weren’t even born yet.  But America went crazy for about a year afterwards.  Here’s some highlights that I remember that might not be in your history books:

There was national discussion on whether or not Halloween should be canceled because…fuck if I know why.  After planes crashed into buildings in NYC it follows that 6-year-olds in Iowa shouldn’t be allowed to dress up like Batman and ask their neighbors for candy, I guess.  (Halloween wasn’t canceled, by the way.)

On a similar note, people asked if comedy - any sort of comedy - was appropriate anymore, ever.

People sold shitty parachutes to suckers “in case your building gets attacked and you have to jump out the window.” There were honest-to-God news reports warning people not to jump out of the window with shitty mail-order parachutes because they wouldn't work.

As a follow-up to the attacks, someone mailed anthrax to some prominent politicians and news anchors - you know, famous people - along with some badly-written notes about “you cannot stop us, death to America, Allah is good” and after that every time some random dumbass found a package in the mail they didn’t recognize they thought that the terrorists were targeting them, too.

Everyone was similarly convinced that their town was going to be the next target, even if they were a little town in the middle of nowhere. "Our town of Bumblefuck, South Dakota (population 690) has the largest styrofoam pig statue west of the Mississippi! Terrorists might fly planes into that too! It's a prime target!"

People started taping up their windows and trying to make their houses or apartments airtight out of fear of chemical and biological attacks. There were news reports warning people that turning your house into an airtight box was a bad idea because, y'know, you need air to breathe.

"[X] supports terrorism!" and “if we do [X], the terrorists win!” were used as arguments for everything.  "Some rich Arab you never heard of donated to his organization that backs Hamas which backs al-Queda, and also owns stock in a holding company that has partial ownership of the Pringles company, so if you eat Pringles you're supporting terrorism!" "The terrorists want to tear down our freedoms and our way of life and rule us through fear! Eating what you want is one of our freedoms as Americans! If you're afraid to eat Pringles, the terrorists win!" (I promise you that this sort of argument is in no way hyperbole.) (This argument is how Halloween was saved, by the way.  “If we cancel Halloween, the terrorists win!”)

People worked 9/11 into everything, and I mean everything, whether it was appropriate or not.  If you went to the grocery store the tortilla chips would remind you to support the troops on the packaging. Used car sales would be dedicated to our brave first responders. You couldn't wipe your ass without the toilet paper rolls reminding you to never forget the fallen of 9/11, and again, this is not hyperbole. My uncle, who lived in Ohio and had never been to New York except to visit once in the 70′s, died of a stroke about 8 months after 9/11, and the priest brought up the attacks at the eulogy.

On a similar local note, on the day of 9/11, after the towers went down, gas stations in my home town immediately jacked up gas prices.  The mayor had the cops go around and force them to take them back down.  I doubt any of that was legal.

Before 9/11, Christianity in America - and religion in general - was on a downward swing, with reddit-tier atheism on the upswing. Religion was outdated superstition from a bygone age. The day after 9/11? Every single church was PACKED. (This wasn't a bad thing, but the power-hungry on the Evangelical Right saw this as a golden opportunity to grab power and influence.)

EDIT: By Popular Demand - Freedom Fries. I initially left these off because they came a couple years after the initial panic and most people thought they were kind of absurd (and I don't recall anyone really going along with it other than maybe some local diners here and there). France didn't want to get involved in our world policing so some folks were like "TRAITORS!" and wanted to call french fries "Freedom Fries" instead, so as to stick it to the French.

Besides dumb shit like that…it’s really hard to overstate how completely the national mood and character changed in the span of a day, or how much of the current culture war is a result of the aftermath. (9/11 was the impetus for the sharp rise in power of the Evangelical Right, who made themselves utterly odious and the following backlash helped the rise of the current Progressive Left, for instance.)

And if all of this seems batshit...well, it was. But I want you to think for a moment how people react today over even trivial shit. People send death threats over children's cartoons. They call for blood if the maker of a video game had an opinion they don't like. If someone made a racist joke a decade ago when they were a teenage edgelord, folks will go after people who even associate with them. "DON'T YOU UNDERSTAND ALL THE HARM THEY'RE DOING!?"

Now take that same level of over-the-top histrionics and apply it to the unprecedented event of passenger planes crashing into crowded buildings in America's most populous city and killing thousands of people all at once. "DON'T YOU UNDERSTAND THAT WE WERE ATTACKED!?"

[neil-gaiman]

I'm sorry Neil, although I love your writing and agree with your opinions on most subjects I have to disagree with you on the writers' strike. No-one should have a more privileged life as a result of being clever and creative. I worked from the age of 15 to the age of 65 in low-paid jobs, taking 1 year off to go to drama school and 3 years off to get a fine art degree. I worked in terrible but necessary jobs, labouring, stacking boxes, unloading trucks, running errands, filing, going to work on a bicycle at all hours of the day and night on shift work in all kinds of weather. Even when I was a student I was still working in part-time cleani8ng jobs and even during periods of unemployment I worked in volunteer jobs for charities and social services.

According to Mensa I have an IQ of 160 and according to Plymouth University I have a BA hons in Fine Art but I cannot accept the idea that writers and other creative people should avoid normal jobs like driving an "Uber" or working in an office/shop/factory/construction site. To accept that idea would be to create a new aristocratic class when we should abolishing the old princes and aristocrats.

What we need, I feel sure, is a redistribution of labour so that everybody who can do so would spend some time each year in blue collar work and everybody who can would get higher education and a chance to make art of one sort or another.

The idea of doing other jobs to supplement writing or drawing shouldn't be seen as a terrible thing, a punishment or a suffering. Sharing the jobs around should be seen as normal.

I mean, I've done my half century of sweat labour and it didn't hurt me too much. I'm retired now and still making art of various kinds and I've never asked anyone to pay me for any art piece I've made. making art, writing, drawing etc. is the fun stuff which we get to do in exchange for the blue collar stuff which puts food on the table.

The worst pop song ever written was Sting/Dire Straits song "Money for Nothing" which ridicules the working class from a position of educational privilege.

So what's my question? My question is: What's wrong with a writer doing other jobs to make ends meet? Sounds perfectly fine to me.

Nothing's wrong with a writer doing other jobs to make ends meet. Writers and artists have been doing that since the dawn of time. Actors too.

But by the same token, there's nothing right about assuming that writing isn't a blue-collar job, or that writers and other people who make art can only make it for love and that thus they need other jobs to subsidise their craft.

I like living in a world in which the people who make the things that make the world worth living in get paid for their work. For me, that includes the people who make films and TV, books, art and music and comics.

Having spent a lot of time on film and TV sets, it's a blue-collar world on set, and everyone is working long and hard to make the shows you love. I'm never going to suggest that the riggers or the gaffers or the make-up team or the focus-pullers should drive ubers in order to have the privilege of being on the set and working there.

Or to put it another way, from the most blue-collar writer I ever knew...

[lulabo]

from folklore on, I’ve purchased all albums directly through the Taylor Swift site as digital pre-orders (because I don’t have a CD or record player) and then been (unreasonably) aggravated that following release additional tracks are issued that require either purchasing the entire digital album again or buying as singles from iTunes, which means I don’t have a full album in the album section of my library, which then also annoys me, so I KNOW the sensible thing is to wait and not pre-purchase and congratulate myself on not falling for these tricks once again but also I instinctively feel the need to purchase RIGHT NOW despite knowing all of this, it is the Charlie Brown football of my life and I CAN’T RUN AT IT

(pls excuse my need to vent my spleen because I have chosen to take this personally like EVERY TIME like a well adjusted adult)

[thebibliosphere]

Hey just to let you know in case you hadn't heard, Ru Paul opened a drop shipping book store and is pretending its a queer bookstore, and then added the entire Ingram collection to the site and wildly marked the prices up more than anywhere else. Both versions of Hunger Pangs are listed and are being sold for $33.32 ($16.66 for "members"). Idk if that is something you have any control over or care about but just in case I figured I should let you know!

Ooft, that's a hefty markup.

Regrettably, I can't control which retailers use Ingram, nor can I control the prices they choose to sell at.

Ru Paul's company, Allstora, can mark it ten times higher than the recommended retail price and claim it as pure profit if they want, and there's nothing I can do about it. (I am side-eyeing the membership price because that is significantly lower than the rrp through Ingram, so I'll need to see how they're compensating for that.)

This is a good time to remind buyers that authors don't get paid more if they buy above the recommended retail price. Our contracts with printers like Ingram are negotiated based on the recommended retail price we select, not the final sale price chosen by retailers.

So, y'know, buy wherever works best for you.

Personally, I won't be buying anything from Allstora when there are queer indie bookstores out there who aren't price gouging their customers.

Incidentally, if you're in the US, if you go to Bookshop.org, you can select which bookstore you want to place your orders from by visiting, bookshop.org/pages/bookstores

When you scroll through the different options, you'll see whether the bookstore is queer-owned, female-owned, black-owned, Indigenous-owned, etc.

It's a neat little way of ordering books online while still being able to support brick-and-mortar stores, even if you don't have one near you. I like to switch mine up every few months just so I'm spreading my money around.

[onewordshy]

I’m sorry I’m trying to support local businesses but I went to five different stores looking for a DVD and I couldn’t find it at any of them so I’m caving and ordering it from Amazon... life is suffering... god gave me his toughest battle...

[trickster-whim]

My birthday is next week, so please send good vibes that this book I found on Abebooks in France is still available and ships to me without problems 🙏

Here's my favorite photo and my current YT avatar to strengthen the ~vibes~